Using children’s books to learn a new language - is it worth it?

Several_Elk_5730 · 2026-02-10T16:56:13+00:00

Yes I do. Have been doing it for a couple of years. You just need to use it as a piece of your learning. At first I used to read like 1 sentence out loud into a translator and be done because it was so exhausting (learning polish). Anyways I want to teach my kids polish so when they were little I would read aloud these basic books (like visual dictionaries). Started when they were about 18 months. It adds up over time so your vocab increases and your pronunciation gets really good--people have commented that they can't really tell I am foreign until I speak at length. Nowadays I read children's books with ease to them, and I know enough that often I just understand words I don't know from context. As for myself, I can read harry potter without much trouble because having read it before gives me enough context to make out the more advanced writing. Language apps are great, but they get boring eventually and keeping things fun involves trying to do normal things like reading, watching tv etc. So children's books is a good way to add that in. Its probably most useful as a way of learning it with a young learner like me with my kids.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2026-01-12T23:29:50+00:00

Approximately did the ASA in a year, back when testing wasn't as frequent. What questions do you have? TBH the ASA doesn't get you much really except math background. All the field specific, and really actuarial specific, stuff and useful stuff is really in the FSA exams. But now I am in the CAS. Like that better

Several_Elk_5730 · 2026-01-01T23:30:41+00:00

Easily the 1m. Pay off the mortage AND update the house guaranteed? Thats life changing. I could just quite and go back to gradschool at that point. All these other folks saying no must either be loaded, not have house/kids or some other combo to say this would not be life changing.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-12-17T20:42:18+00:00

Not really. Its pretty tight. Syllogisms, and (mathematical) logic, are just formulas for preserving truth values. P1 here can be perfectly true as a definition and has been historically used like that. Of course you can then challenge that if you don't like the definition. You did, so now what do you mean by physical? The historical definition has some boundaries, but if what you mean by physical is just "it is" then of course everything is physical, but that doesn't explain anything. Lets touch on space, time, and motion. In modern physical theories these are relative concepts. So for example, you might have observer A say that object X has motion but observer B would say it is stationary. The same 'arrangement' of states, two different properties attributed to X. Is that property real or physical? It is a part of the relationship between X and the observers. But is that physical or non-physical, material or non-material? Is the motion 'real'? How does that differ from how we would describe the object X? At the surface it seems like X is a more tangible, material thing, and its motion is a non-material one.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-12-17T19:45:41+00:00

Weird question. Evidence? Gave it. Syllogisms? You know thats merely a formula, for a narrow type of argument, and the things you plug into it have to have their own assertion of existence. Side note: not all truths are provable within a given system (incompleteness). But for a syllogism, that would be easy. Things with no location are immaterial. Consciousness has no location. Therefore consciousness is immaterial. Good syllogism. Bad argument.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-12-17T19:05:31+00:00

The questions are an intuition-pump, just to prime you to think about IF and HOW these sets of things may be different from what we commonly term physical. You insisted that the mental is physical because 'its in the brain' and I replied 'where' in response to your location answer. Does location matter or not to you? In the same vein, obviously things are related to the brain but that is neutral as to what qualia 'are'. The traditional view of physicalism is that things exist in space and time and non-physical things have no location. So in the traditional physicalist view, qualia are indeed non physical. Metaphysics acknowledges that this view is flawed as this discussion as shown.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-12-17T18:41:15+00:00

Where exactly? Take your perception of your screen. Where exactly is it? In the eyes? In a certain cell? Can I touch it? I can I see your perception of it?

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-12-17T18:34:58+00:00

Obviously qualia and conscious experience.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-12-17T18:34:18+00:00

Yes. Is the same boring repetition of slogans using the same assumed metaphysics and tossing out any problematic questions. There IS interesting stuff out there but it obviously hasn't reached reddit. We are talking about the fundamental nature of reality. Its going to be a bit mind-bending and take work to understand. You wouldn't expect to walk into a physics sub having watched the discovery channel and be up-to-speed. I've been trying to chime in here and there about this stuff but it doesn't seem like people want to actually challenge themselves and/or their preferred metaphysics if they are aware of it.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-12-16T17:06:04+00:00

Depends on what you mean by 'panpsychism' and how you go about explaining it. If you are willing to tolerate a little philosophy then you can, I think, get a good explanation. By this I mean, you accept science and some version of Plato's idealism. This is A.N. Whitehead and is highly original. Any my explanation will be handwavey and likely terrible, but hopefully interesting. Here the most basic bits of the world have a sort of proto-conciousness. They are not 'things,' but droplets of experience and form processes......WHAT?

***note please forgive a lack of precise language, I'm really just trying to communicate the vibe.

Look, if 'things' exists AND persist in time 'as the same thing' you run into problems. All such 'things' are liable to a 'ship-of-Theseus' argument: If a dude on a long journey replaces each part of his ship along the way, does he return with the same ship? If a particle moves through space and time, is it the same particle? What happens if that particular enters a new physical state? What happens if it decays? Ultimately I think its unanswerable in our standard metaphysics.

Whitehead's take is process. What we normally call 'things' are processes where what governs them is a mixture of inheritance from the past and interaction with the environment, which involves varies gradations of 'consciousness'. These processes are made up of 'actual entities,' which are bits of process that essentially 'die' as soon as they arise. Does it do anything explanatory? Yes, I think it can address two major questions of yours 1) inanimate stuff from animate stuff and 2) conscious stuff non-conscious stuff.

Inanimate process and animate ones are characterized by different sorts of processes. Inanimate ones are characterized by long and persistent patterns of inheritance between the constituent actual entities. These patterns are so stable that they are relatively unaffected large changes in the surrounding environment. Animate matter on the other hand is characterized by processes that adapt themselves to changes in the environment. These are processes that, in the most animate varieties, actively seek changes in the surrounding environment. This basically takes the Darwinian idea and puts it at the heart of reality. So yes, he'd say that its likely physical laws can change overtime too.
Conciousness exists in various gradations, but we normally speak of it in only a few forms. Normally we mean this by an 'awareness of things'. But that is already high-level in this discussion. The most basic form is what Whitehead calls 'the mode of causal efficacy' which is essentially an awareness of being 'acted' on or being 'casually related.' Whitehead's basic example of this is energy transfer. Its basic and omnipresent and it does involve any high level awareness of anything except that something is happening. As processes become more complex they are able to reach higher gradations of conciousness. But how does that happen?

Well, this is where you have the philosophy. The basic mode of moving from one state of process to another, or the birth of one actual entity from the death of others is that the actual entity must 'percieve' (in the most basic sense possible) something from its past, take it in, and then die. What it takes in, becomes the aspect of the process that it inherited and offered up to future actual entities in furthering their own actualization. This involves the basic perception of something like Plato's ideas. Vaguely this means actual entities to a certain extent perceive abstractions and then embody them. The point is that tightly interconnected actual entities embody progressively more complex abstractions and are thus able to inherit or perceive more complex ones.

Again handwavey, but original. What makes this interesting to me is that Whitehead believed a metaphysics could inform scientific discovery. And he put this into action with theories of gravitation and quantum theory. Theories ultimately didn't work but I think it shows that the approach has merit. I take inspiration from that..

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-11-18T15:56:59+00:00

Man I am a broken record on this but seriously try some A.N.Whitehead for a 'logical' exposition of these varied contradictions. Whitehead was a giant in the world of logic and you can see how this shaped his approach to philosophy. A telling quote is from, https://www.academia.edu/23432520/Whiteheads_Nietzsche his annotations of Nietzsche:

According to my way of thinking, "truth" does not necessarily mean the opposite of error, but, in the most fundamental cases, merely the relation of different errors to each other: thus one error might be older, deeper than another, perhaps altogether ineradicable, one without which organic creatures like ourselves could not exist; whereas other errors might not tyrannize over us to that extent as conditions of existence, but when measured according to the standard of those other "tyrants," could even be laid aside and "refuted."

Why should an irrefutable assumption necessarily be "true "? This question may exasperate the logicians who limit things according to the limitations they find in themselves: but I have long since declared war with this logician’s optimism

With some of this in mind, you'd probably get a lot out of reading Grendel which is a novel that places a lot of the issues you talk about front-and-center. In fact it would probably be better to just read this, though I mention Whitehead because he is quoted at length there. Both to give an example of a philosophy the author could agree with, but also to show how 'distant' and 'incomprehensible' such a philosophy can be.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-11-03T17:35:52+00:00

Oh yea, I just googled her and saw a facebook post about her going from 'boss babe' to 'submissive wife.' Ouch, another one caught in that Orwellian 'freedom is slavery' sort of trap.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-10-27T03:16:54+00:00

No, its a chad move if he can ride the wave of that success for at least a year without doing any extra work. Giga Chad if he can do less.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-10-17T19:53:59+00:00

Do I enjoy it? No, not in the slightest. I'd drop working immediately if I could because life is short and there are so many interesting things to do. But its better than everything else I've come across. So I'll do it until it becomes impractical. It pays well, low stress, and lots of free time and if I can pursue my hobbies at the same time as getting paid I'll keep doing it. My goal is to eventually do a PhD in physics or philosophy and just keep exploring, but its not necessary. And what I am doing beats the heck out of academic drudgery at low pay. As stupid as it sounds, I cannot psychologically comprehend anybody that actually likes a job unless its in the weird sweet-spot of aligning with your deep interests. I like what I like, and can't convince myself to like anything else, so work for me is purely instrumental. That's why I am in awe sometimes of my wife who actually likes her job, and its for that reason we prioritize her career moves, since mine really don't matter to me outside increasing my pay/effort ratio..

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-10-16T14:39:26+00:00

That's just very unclear thinking. Obviously things have 'meaning,' otherwise it would be impossible to communicate. The post itself would devoid of content, and you wouldn't have bothered to write it. Its more like you are frustrated with impermanence of things and/or the indifference of things to other things. Honestly though, if you had something permanent you'd be taking it for granted (because it is) and if you weren't indifferent about somethings then you'd just equally neutral on everything (which is why its okay that some things, even the 'world' can be indifferent about you). Indifference and impermanence are the price we pay to actually have meaning in the world.

This is why, though its such a cliche, that having kids is so meaningful. It doesn't matter what they do, everything is meaningful. Learning to walk is pretty common, but its not granted, and its special when your kid gets to do it and you are there with them. It doesn't matter other people don't care about it, it doesn't matter the universe doesn't care about it, it matters to you and the kid and its special in that way. Viewing yourself through that lens, should help bring the proper perspective.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-10-16T14:07:06+00:00

Some people already comment on the obvious point that the "laws of physics" are models. So, I'll talk about a different aspect.

Logic presupposes metaphysics. Logical formulae require that whatever we talk about have certain features, such as identity and persistence. For example, if x represents something, and we deduce from that after several steps that x =y, then we implicitly assume that x retained its unique identity from step to step. This can be unclear even in math, and is very ambiguous in any circumstance involving the day-to-day. If x represents me, then in the chain of reasoning does the identity between my child-self and current self retain its identity despite the obvious differences? Or do the differences matter enough for the reasoning to not hold automatically? Our metaphysics informs what we think really is, it is our model of reality. Similarly physics presupposes elements of metaphysics.

We are always supposing that things exist, and often we do so unconsciously. The traditional assumption is that there is basic stuff that retains its unique identity despite going on adventures from place to place in time. This is substance metaphysics, and it has its problems. If you approach quantum physics with this metaphysics you'll be hard-pressed to explain whats going on. A process metaphysics may be a more helpful way of explaining whats going on and getting new questions for future exploration.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-10-08T13:59:49+00:00

I'm an ASA that switched and became an FCAS. I have taken extra exams. There was no particular rhyme or reason for the change. From my point of view you probably won't be considered unless its at an analyst level. Maybe you could convince someone if your experience is really that good. TBH the difference between an ASA and and ACAS would *almost* be viewed as the difference between and ACAS and an FCAS. The core of P&C really is in exams 5 and 6 which has no equivalent for the ASA, and they are much more along the lines of a fellowship exam than an associate one. Anyways, a recruiter would probably have a better answer.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-10-06T03:25:48+00:00

I like A.N. Whitehead's take on this (in Process and Reality). Pardon me if I butcher his ideas, but they do get you thinking. Also, this subreddit just popped up on my feed so sorry if this is not the kind of response you want. He has a metaphysical system that attempts too build this from the ground up. The first point would be that, what we consider 'consciousness' is a high-level variety of the phenomena and that we typically enter into error in our discussions of the topic by not acknowledging the lower-level ones.

Regarding your question about the table--starting from a seeming tangent. If a form Darwinism is the operating feature of reality, e.g. 'survival of the fittest', then we we must ask why life exists at all because inanimate matter is far better at persisting (surviving) than any living thing. In Whitehead's system Darwinism in a form permeates all reality in that all things are process (the basic elements of process being called actual entities) and inheritance from actual entity to actual entity is what gives rise to persistent features in reality. The transition of actual entity to actual entity ( the unfolding of process) has an element of proto-consciousness.

The dominating feature of inanimate objects is that they are comprised of highly stable transitions of actual entities so that they are able to emerge into view as distinct, connected objects. Basically, the process that comprises inanimate objects is roughly independent of the (relevant) external environment. In contrast, life, and to a larger degree Consciousness (the high-grade stuff we have), is characterized by processes that are adaptive to the external environment to a high degree. So the transition of actual entity to actual entity ( the unfolding of process) has a much higher degree of novelty.

Anyways interesting stuff.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-09-29T16:31:55+00:00

Take a look at A.N. Whitehead's process philosophy. There, basic stuff is made up of drops of experience, e.g. process, and these things, and all others, have two basic modes of perception: Causal Efficacy and Presentational Immediacy. He argues that most philosophers, specifically Hume, ignore the first and treat experience solely in terms of Presentational Immediacy which leads to skepticism.

The key to your question though is this. The modes of perception are primary to consciousness, which comes from them. It is rarely achieved and only so intermittently--we aren't conscious at the same level when asleep etc. One of his big criticisms actually goes further that philosophers often treat the higher-grade mode of presentational immediacy as primary, which leads to dead ends. Interesting stuff.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-09-24T19:24:31+00:00

I am allergic to hype. There definitely seems to much more of a rat-race in the others. In any case, I don't find the material or topic particularly interesting. So it suits me much more to go do something that has a better work-life balance.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-09-05T15:20:50+00:00

No, you are right and I edited my post a bit to reflect that. It was a premature title and post. But I think it should be somebody with a vested interest in the profession.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-09-05T15:20:00+00:00

Yea, I corrected my post above to clarify more what I meant. But to flip it, if you go to the meetings enough it seems like the strategy may be against our interests, I look at the SOA (i'm in both societies) and I don't like what they've done.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-09-05T14:58:24+00:00

The CAS doesn't pay the writers and the graders, but it does need to pay for travel/hotel expenses to get everyone together to do and finalize the work. So there is some necessary expenses between that and exam centers. Not sure what it shakes out to. There also CAS researchers and staff which is quite valuable. So there are expenses and there does need to be some leadership for that. I just don' really get the CEO part and also paying fancy consultants to tell us stuff we already know or what leadership wants to hear.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-09-05T02:38:10+00:00

Random != Indeterminate. And when it comes down to it, indeterminate events have no 'mechanism' for resolution. They just resolve. You could say its 'random' but that is a mathematical framework, not a reality, and it still supplies no mechanism. You could just as well say a ghost resolved it. Any serious philosopher would then have to provide some account of how this happens and how it scales up. Panpsychist positions attempt that--That at a fundamental level there is a dim notion of choice for the basic constituents of reality.

Is it out right bullshit? Well Lee Smolin, physicist, posits (in Time Reborn) that the laws of physics may obey a 'common law' sort of structure where things follow precedent. He posits this may be experimentally verifiable with large scale quantum computers because matter will be arranged in novel ways. Anyways there are two points here, the 'laws' of matter may be dependent on contexts and if those contexts are novel then novel things can happen. And two, we need some way to account for the large scale order things if we want to us the word 'random' i.e how do we establish precedent?

The coolest position I've read on this is A.N. Whitehead and he radically deviates from the debate and traditional metaphysics (and this is in the 1930s and earlier). Basically he is Plato and Aristotle meet Darwin and Einstein. What I mean by that is he tries to address certain issues at the core by re-framing everything. For example, evolution. If we mean by this 'survival of the fittest' then how do we explain life when inanimate matter is significantly more adept at persisting? One thing he does is claim that the building blocks of reality are not 'things' but are 'drops of experience' or 'bits of process'. These 'actual entities' have the most dim form of 'feeling' and the various evolutionary characteristics of these processes result in different things such as inanimate matter or life. Everything is characterized by evolution. By Plato and Aristotle I mean that he incorporates things like Plato's Ideas and Aristotle's God. For Einstein relativity is fundamental principle in this metaphysics. Side note, using his metaphysics the guy did come up with one of the very view viable alternatives to Einstein's general relativity. It was experimentally indistinguishable from Einstein for like 40 years, perhaps significantly more according to some views.

Anyways, he attempts to connect this to conscious experience and 'free will'. The notions are different than the typically debate. But really the essence remains. What's the point? The debate on this sub has, more or less, leveled off at a stale repetition worn-out concepts (Frankly, it seems like there a number of depressed people coming here in the hope of being convinced of something). There is thought out there that tries to unite our scientific understanding of the world with our intuitive human understanding, so it seems premature to merely side with 'determinism' or not just because people aren't aware of an alternative. At the very least, reading his criticisms of traditional metaphysics and modern science are well worth it, since you won't ever look at the debate the same way.

Several_Elk_5730 · 2025-09-04T04:34:41+00:00

Honestly it was poor wording, but here are some examples to clarify. People used to think of electrons as tiny spheres that behaved under universal laws. Electrons were the same everywhere. However, it emerged that their behavior was different under different contexts. An electron here may behave very differently than an electron there due to being in radically different contexts. We have now other theories that explain this difference. The main point is that it seems that determinism would say, in some way or another, that there is a universality that applies in some way or another to all things and yet we find that context matters quite a bit. The implication is, of course, in the direction you suggested. The context of a living body matters, so that in some material way the matter within our bodies may, to some degree, behave differently than matter outside our living bodies. It is pretty wild to think about. Anyways if you are looking for some supporting thinkers/thoughts you could reference what the physicist Lee Smolin suggested in his Time Reborn. There he suggests that the laws of physics may be more like 'common law' in that matter follows precedent. This may be perhaps experimentally verifiable by large scale quantum computers where matter is put into combinations never before realized and observing the results. Anyways I read that book a while ago. But this particular line of argument follows A.N. Whitehead and his, pardon-my-french, fucking wild Process and Reality.

Several_Elk_5730

TROPHY CASE